The role of the media and public opinion

It is noticeable that all the serious miscarriages of justice occurred in cases where a particular
crime had outraged public opinion, and led to enormous pressure on the police
to find the culprits. In the case of the Birmingham Six, feelings ran so high that the
trial judge consented to the case being heard away from Birmingham, on the ground
that a Birmingham jury might be unable to bring to the trial that degree of detachment
that is necessary to reach a dispassionate and objective verdict. Given the
graphic media descriptions of the carnage the real bombers had left behind them, it
was in fact debatable whether any jury, anywhere, would have found it easy to summon
up such detachment. The chances of a fair trial must have decreased even further when,
halfway through the trial, the Daily Mirror devoted an entire front page to photographs
of the Six, boasting that they were the first pictures (implying that they were the first
pictures of the bombers).
The miscarriages of justice were characterised by a reluctance to refer cases back to
appeal. While campaigning by some newspapers and television programmes was eventually
to help bring about the successful appeals, other sections of the media, and in
particular the tabloid newspapers, were keen to dismiss the idea that miscarriages of
justice might have occurred. Nor was there a great amount of public interest in the
alleged plight of the Birmingham Six or the other victims in stark contrast to the
petitioning on behalf of Private Lee Clegg during 1995. There was a common feeling
of satisfaction that someone had been punished for such terrible crimes, and the
public did not want to hear that the system had punished the wrong people.
Even when the miscarriages of justice were finally uncovered, a lingering whispering
campaign suggested that the victims of those miscarriages had been let off on
some kind of technicality that there had been police misbehaviour, but that those
accused of the bombings and so on were really guilty. Again, tabloid newspapers were
only too pleased to contribute to this view. On the day that the report of the Royal
Commission on Criminal Justice was published, the Daily Mail printed an article entitled
The true victims of injustice. In it, victims of the bombings expressed anger that the
Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six had been released as though justice for those
wrongly convicted of a crime somehow meant less justice for the victims of that crime
and raised doubts as to their innocence. The newspaper commented that the decent
majority were more concerned to see measures designed to convict criminals than to
prevent further miscarriages of justice.
On the other hand, in the case of Stephen Lawrence, the young black student
murdered at a bus stop in south London in an apparently racially motivated attack, one
branch of the media saw itself as a vital tool in fighting for justice. The refusal of five
youths, whom many suspected to be the murderers, to give evidence at the coroners
court led to the Daily Mail labelling them as the killers on its front pages, despite the
fact that they had already been acquitted by a criminal court.
The implications of all this for the criminal justice system are important. Clearly
such a system does not operate in a vacuum and, in jury trials in particular, public
opinion can never really be kept out of the courtroom. That does not mean that juries
should not be used in emotive cases, nor that the media should be gagged. What it

The role of the media and public opinion.txt[2/16/2017 3:14:08 PM]